Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa's Deluge by Kimura Yūsuke

Author:Kimura Yūsuke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

(A rough outline of Uncle Isa’s movements)

Squid fishing → finance → squid fishing (two cases of assault) → admitted to the psych ward of the hospital → ? (unlikely to have been gainfully employed) → to Kawasaki (assume he was employed as a day laborer or other temporary work. Never again returned to Hachinohe) → suffers a stroke and is disabled. Admitted to a facility for people without family support?

• At one point he was also a moneylender. The relatives in the main house had sold off a large tract of land, and Isa had received a share (which was evidently quite sizable). He went to Hakodate to live with an aunt and began moneylending there. It seems likely that he lent money to a small-time gambler and was unable to recover his money; eventually the operation went bust.

• After his assault cases he spent time in jail in Hakodate and Shizuoka. Every time he returned to the main house he would break things and threaten them all with a knife. No one could contain his excessive violence; some relatives admitted him to the psychiatric unit. One assumes this was to cure his violent disposition and alcoholism, but following his release he held on to his grudge until the end.

• Overseas labor: it appears that he spent some time in Saudi Arabia working construction on oil refineries. (This is about the time of the changes to access of international waters—200 nautical mile limit issue—and since the number of boats was reduced, so too were the possibilities for work in squid fishing back home.) According to how Hitoshi told it, Isa talked about being in a place where temperatures could reach 50 degrees Celsius, a place of such fierce heat that “I could watch the sweat on my arms turn to steam.” Isa said he could make 10 million yen in a year’s time; and it was a fact that Isa had paid back all his loans, and then some. During those years that Isa was not in Japan, over at the main house, which Isa had so frequently terrorized, things were calm and quiet for a time.

A sigh, another sip of coffee. He enjoyed recording Uncle Isa’s life. It was an odd sort of gratification, not unlike picking up unusual badges and foreign coins to fill an empty keepsakes box.

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